How To Diagnose Dyslexia?
Getting to diagnose a person with dyslexia is a process that does not have to be short or fast. On the contrary, health teams take their time to determine the existence of the disorder, since it opens up a range of possible treatments and future approaches.
The quality of life for the person with dyslexia can be good, but that will depend on early detection and subsequent support. Multidisciplinary therapies are the key to incorporating the patient into normal and social life.
What is dyslexia?
To diagnose dyslexia you have to start by defining it. Basically, it is a learning disorder, specifically of reading and writing, with onset in childhood, associated with the lack of achievement of certain parameters that are expected at each age of the child.
What is striking is that people with the disorder do not usually have an associated problem that explains it from the outside. That is, no physical or mental alterations are detected that determine the existence of a failure in what they learn.
A dyslexic child does not learn the alphabet and has trouble identifying letter by letter. The sounds of words also become strange to you, with serious obstacles to knowing what you are reading, to the point that syllables change when you read, replace them or distort them. When they detect themselves that they have interpretation difficulties, reading becomes slower and more hesitant.
Some authors focus the definition of the problem on the ability to decode the message. That is, the child with dyslexia has not developed the ability to assume the code with which others speak, so something stops the transformation of the word into meaning.
Symptoms to diagnose dyslexia
Arriving at the diagnosis of dyslexia is complicated when it depends, almost at all, on the interpretation made by health professionals. In the absence of fully confirmatory tests, criteria are met to establish the presence of the disorder.
Reading difficulty
It is, perhaps, the initial and most prominent sign. In dyslexia, the child reads poorly because he uses multiple failed tools to arrive at an assumed meaning of the words.
Swap one letter for another, modify syllables, rotate words and sounds, repeat and read very slowly. It is possible that once you have finished a reading, you do not know what the text said, since the sound of the alphabet does not correspond to a cognitive meaning already worked out in your mind.
Writing problems
Reading difficulty undoubtedly affects writing. In dyslexia there is repetition of the errors of the previous point when putting thoughts in writing. Letters are omitted, syllables are changed, punctuation marks do not exist, or they are placed in places that make the text unreadable.
The syntax of the dyslexic is poor because he lacks the tools to express himself. Not always, but sometimes, the scrawl of the letters also changes for the worse, as a sign of difficulty.
Targeted literacy disorder
It is not uncommon for dyslexic children to arouse the curiosity of teachers because they have such good intellectual capacity in almost everything, except in language and Spanish. There is no mental retardation far from it, and the maturation of a large part of the development areas is within expected parameters.
Obstacles to achieving lexical tasks
In school, which happens to be the main detection site for dyslexia, students with the problem do not complete language tasks correctly. If they are asked to point to capital letters or to find words in a word search, they are lost in the task.
The order and sequencing problem sometimes extends to other more mathematical and geometric areas, although it is not the rule. When this expansion of the difficulty does occur, children do not learn to multiply or to order the days of the week, for example.
Altered behavior
Dyslexia can be suspected and diagnosed when high-profile stress affects the lives of children who have problems in school. The mere fact of being delayed in front of the evolution of his companions, is enough to initiate visceral and emotional symptoms.
Conduct disorders tend to be relativized in educational establishments. It is assumed that a small problem is a consequence of their lack of interest in learning, and vice versa. Little by little, the dyslexic enters a category of second-grade student, with whom we must not waste time because, in any case, he will not learn.
There are patients who are diagnosed with depression before dyslexia is detected, and the time lost in the wrong name that is put to their condition, delays professional help. They are even prescribed drugs that do not help at all.
Who Diagnoses Dyslexia?
Since there are no complementary diagnostic methods, such as MRIs or brain scans, leading to the diagnosis, it is valid to ask: who makes the diagnosis and how?
Within learning disorders and their approach, we would say that psychopedagogues, speech therapists and neuropsychologists are the specialists trained for this task. Through joint tests and evaluations, multidisciplinary teams can gather criteria that raise suspicion.
In the end, a report signed by the health team will be the diagnosis certificate and, at the same time, the positive response obtained from the appropriate stimuli for dyslexia will support the expert opinion. The next step is the family and educational commitment to adapt the knowledge acquisition process to each child’s journey.
There is no need to be afraid to arrange a consultation with the psychopedagogy offices in schools and health centers. As parents or caregivers, getting a dyslexia diagnosis early can completely change a child’s future evolution.
